“i should never have learned words, how much better off I’d be if I lived in world where meanings didn’t matter, the world with no words.”
i watched this like a week ago, and i’m not going to lie, i'm still trying to process it. like it was exceptionally good, but almost just hard to put into words. i’m relatively new to this director, and japanese cinema as a whole. the main reason why i gave this a try was because of my past positive experiences with japanese horror, from every sub-genre honestly. ‘machine girl’ and ‘tokyo gore police’ were two examples that even after months have gone past since i watched them, they still are highly relevant to my mind, due to their general outrageousness of gore that puts american cinema to shame. ‘suicide club’ is another great one, and it came from the same director as ‘guilty of romance’. while ‘suicide club’ was a fun ride, this movie truly blew me away: like i felt it was a lot more my thing, and it definitely has encouraged me to watch more foreign horror. after watching, i really had to search up what the movie was about, because its extremely surreal and fragmented, very much like a jigsaw piece, and can be quite hard to understand especially half asleep. the narrative follows a detective case as a woman has been murdered in a ‘love hotel’. the corpse is unrecognisable just because of the extremity the killer went while carrying out the killing. it explores the lives of three different women in japan, all closely linking to this case. izumi, a sexually repressed housewife who lives a monotonous lifestyle trying to please her arrogant husband. while working at a supermarket, an unknown woman finds her, and she eventually makes herself into nude photography, and then becomes a prostitute trying to break her repetitive cycle of another person controlling her. mitsuko is kind of the woman who tempts izuki into life of prostitution, she’s a professor at day, but walks the streets at night. those two women’s story are investigated by kazuko, a detective who tries to discover the killer of the prostitute in the hotel. this film uses prostitution as a deep form of liberation of women who are sexually repressed due to ideas in society. it’s undeniably quite muddled, the actual detective case itself isn’t really developed within the second half, as it focuses more time on the actual character studies of all three women, but each woman is given a really unique, different arc that represent something totally different retrospectively, and i think that was the great thing. besides that, this movie just had such a unique, dream-like feel to it that really makes it stick out from everything else. it’s really tense, with constant drone noises in the background. the visuals are also incredible, and breath taking. the colour is used in such a powerful way, the entire love hotel is filled with neon set designs and drug-crazed, hallucinogenic pinkish lightning, also those balls which always exploded pink everywhere were also amazing. all that was a massive contrast to the minimalistic domestic life. the soundtrack also is just perfectly matched to the atmosphere for ‘guilty of romance’. i’m definitely gonna need a couple more watched to fully get it, but really great.
“i should never have learned words, how much better off I’d be if I lived in world where meanings didn’t matter, the world with no words.”
i watched this like a week ago, and i’m not going to lie, i'm still trying to process it. like it was exceptionally good, but almost just hard to put into words. i’m relatively new to this director, and japanese cinema as a whole. the main reason why i gave this a try was because of my past positive experiences with japanese horror, from every sub-genre honestly. ‘machine girl’ and ‘tokyo gore police’ were two examples that even after months have gone past since i watched them, they still are highly relevant to my mind, due to their general outrageousness of gore that puts american cinema to shame. ‘suicide club’ is another great one, and it came from the same director as ‘guilty of romance’. while ‘suicide club’ was a fun ride, this movie truly blew me away: like i felt it was a lot more my thing, and it definitely has encouraged me to watch more foreign horror. after watching, i really had to search up what the movie was about, because its extremely surreal and fragmented, very much like a jigsaw piece, and can be quite hard to understand especially half asleep. the narrative follows a detective case as a woman has been murdered in a ‘love hotel’. the corpse is unrecognisable just because of the extremity the killer went while carrying out the killing. it explores the lives of three different women in japan, all closely linking to this case. izumi, a sexually repressed housewife who lives a monotonous lifestyle trying to please her arrogant husband. while working at a supermarket, an unknown woman finds her, and she eventually makes herself into nude photography, and then becomes a prostitute trying to break her repetitive cycle of another person controlling her. mitsuko is kind of the woman who tempts izuki into life of prostitution, she’s a professor at day, but walks the streets at night. those two women’s story are investigated by kazuko, a detective who tries to discover the killer of the prostitute in the hotel. this film uses prostitution as a deep form of liberation of women who are sexually repressed due to ideas in society. it’s undeniably quite muddled, the actual detective case itself isn’t really developed within the second half, as it focuses more time on the actual character studies of all three women, but each woman is given a really unique, different arc that represent something totally different retrospectively, and i think that was the great thing. besides that, this movie just had such a unique, dream-like feel to it that really makes it stick out from everything else. it’s really tense, with constant drone noises in the background. the visuals are also incredible, and breath taking. the colour is used in such a powerful way, the entire love hotel is filled with neon set designs and drug-crazed, hallucinogenic pinkish lightning, also those balls which always exploded pink everywhere were also amazing. all that was a massive contrast to the minimalistic domestic life. the soundtrack also is just perfectly matched to the atmosphere for ‘guilty of romance’. i’m definitely gonna need a couple more watched to fully get it, but really great.
